The knife, the bathtub, the butcher and the corpse

We know how much chefs love their knives -- "It's hurt me, I've hurt it, and we're still together," joked Kyle Fitzgerald in last week's Chef and Tell interview -- but Heiko K, a slasher chef in Germany, took butchery to a whole new level when he dismembered a man who wouldn't give him the Deutsche marks he needed to bail himself out of debt.

A German chef has been sentenced to life imprisonment after he strangled a colleague with a dog leash and dismembered his corpse in a bathtub.

Heiko K met Marcus Shindlbeck at his Munich apartment in January 2009 to discuss his finances, German news site Bild.de reports.

When Mr. Schindlbeck refused to lend the trained chef money, Heiko K wrapped a dog leash around his throat and strangled him.

He then dismembered the corpse in a bathtub in the apartment with a knife and a saw, before fleeing the country in his victim's car with the body parts.

Heiko K, whose full name has not been published in the German press, was arrested in February 2009 at the Austrian-Hungarian border.

The 40-year-old admitted he was deep in debt and had planned to kill Mr. Schindlbeck if he did not give him money.

"Unless I get my goal, I'll kill him, I was thinking in the car," he told the Munich district court.

Parts of the dismembered corpse were found in Germany and the Czech Republic last year, although the full body has never been found.

Heiko K's skill as a chef was reportedly evident in the way the body parts had been cut, with Czech authorities originally suspecting a butcher or a doctor as the culprit.

Despite being issued a life sentence, Heiko K will be eligible for conditional release from prison in 15 years.

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